This blog addresses issues in the current museum and art gallery worlds through the perspective of the discipline of art history.

Monday, December 3, 2012

A quick discussion on Marxism and Art

Marxism is a social and economic theory which informs art
history, history proper and all disciplines that involve history. With regards to art history, Marxism
considers the relationship between everyday people and art by way of attempting
to place art in the context of its users or consumers. The use of Marxist theory to study art
history became popular in the 1970s when scholars shifted from using political
and military historical methodologies to a social historical lens in an effort
to locate the experience of, not just great men or authors of history, but of
the proletariat.

Marxist theory is based upon the idea that all human life is
governed by material concerns. According
to Marx, all of society consists of two elements. The individual experiences alienation and
repression by way of the “superstructure” and its relation to the “base.” The “base” describes and contains all forces related
to production, e.g. the employer/employee relationship and all relationships
between those who own and control forces of production and those who enact
production. The “superstructure” is created by the aforementioned relationships
and consists of culture, religion, institutions, ideas of the state and systems
of power. The imbalance of power between
the “base” and the “superstructure” causes alienation from labor and production
as the proletariat is identified by his job, not just socially, but also
through self-identification. This
mutually self-determining problem is cyclical and difficult to break and allows
for a “false consciousness” to veil the negative qualities of this
relationship. The “false consciousness”
is a process in capitalist society which is intentionally misleading to the
proletariat and leads to commodity fetishism in the lower classes. In this way, the individual resolves the
experience of alienation and repression through a false belief in a natural
law, thereby creating a fundamental need to compete with others.

The creation and existence of art, which in Marxist thought
is a manifestation of human desire and imagination, allows for the “base” to be
transformed by conscious-altering ideas.
Therefore, art is an avenue by which the individual can break through
the debilitating fog of “false consciousness.”
Art can create a state of conscious-altering in a society which can then
initiate a revolution. The avant-garde,
then, rises to protect culture against capitalist forces. By encouraging individuals to think outside
of the limits to which their thoughts are regulated by the systems of power, art
serves to eradicate the “demystification” present in capitalist society.

For example the early twentieth-century Art Nouveau, Art
Deco and most specifically the Arts and Crafts movements were essentially a
revolution against the cheap Victorian style which was dominated by mass-produced
objects. High artistry and high quality of workers’ craftsmanship came to
dominate these movements in contrast to capitalist mass production valued
previously. The works of Toulouse
Lautrec and Mucha from this time period illustrate the rejection of Victorian
ideals and social norms in favor of a new, avant-garde style. This art came in an era when factory workers
rebelled against the wealthy industry owners determined to keep them underpaid
and without any rights.

ore recently the pop art works of Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein of the 1960s which commented on mass production (Warhol with his multiple
screen prints and canvases and Lichtenstein with his repetition of dots) went hand-in-hand
with the 1960s counter-culture of revolution and the 1968 worker revolts and
student sit-ins motivated by a general dissatisfaction with the
operations of society. Warhol’s
100 Campbell’s Soup Cans sought to critique capitalism, an economic
system which was beginning to show its drawbacks during the 60s. By using the image of a quotidian object, one
which contained no seeable aesthetic value, Warhol questioned the relation
between desire and availability and how market forces affect the
individual. His use of the repeated form
and method of production commented on the systems of mass production.

Contemporary artists Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst continue to
deal with capitalist tendencies in their works which comment on the
commoditization and fetishization of high art.
Koons’ kitschy works and Hirst’s seemingly absurd conceptual art (e.g. the tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde) sell for abominable prices despite
their departure from canonical art ideals. Hirst's spotted paintings also seem to follow Lichtenstein in that the repetition and variety of his subject lead one to think about mass production, the choices made for the everyday people by the elite class, and questions the concept of freedom. Their works and those of others can be said to relate to current revolutionary
trends in “going green," being more aware of our wastefulness of resources, and
lessening our carbon footprints as they critique the unnecessary and frivolousness within modern society.

Many twentieth and twenty-first century scholars use a
Marxist lens to study the art of the last one-hundred and fifty years. Scholar Solomon Maynard states that the
application of Marxism in the discipline of art history was never carried out
by Marx himself and cautions that doing so can lead the student in an endless
amount of directions. T.J. Clark uses a
Marxist standpoint to re-examine Manet’s Olympiain “Olympia’s Choice” in which
he determines that Olympiais art which illustrates how capital is made into an image.

Meyer Schapiro is also a Marxist theorist who
uses this social art historical methodology to interpret Monet’s A Painting
of Shoes and concludes that the artist’s status in society proves that the
shoes belong to the artist not to a peasant woman.

Through the work of these scholars and artists it is evident
that as long as the society operates under capitalistic ideologies, Marxist theories are
indispensable in the study of, not only economics, but also art, culture, and society.

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About Me

I am a recipient of an M.A.in art history from Savannah College of Art and Design specializing in contemporary art, art criticism, critical theory, and Native American art and architecture. I earned a BA in French and History from Michigan State University. I am Director of the Grand Bohemian Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. In my free time, I research and write critically and analytically about art and how it relates to life. I believe that one can better understand oneself through an examination of that by which one is surrounded. The physicality and tangibility of this knowledge is what interests me. Through a venue of art and cultural material, I endeavor to use my skills and education to help inform the public on current cultural, social, and economic issues. A comprehension of art, then, can lead to an understanding of current societies and cultures, in turn, lending insight into the future and becoming a tool for change.